Prologue:

Linux is a phenomenon of the Internet. Born out of the hobby project of a student it has grown to become more popular than any other freely available operating system. To many Linux is an enigma. How can something that is free be worthwhile? In a world dominated by a handful of large software corporations, how can something that has been written by a bunch of ``hackers'' (sic) hope to compete? How can software contributed to by many different people in many different countries around the world have a hope of being stable and effective? Yet stable and effective it is and compete it does. Many Universities and research establishments use it for their everyday computing needs. People are running it on their home PCs and I would wager that most companies are using it somewhere even if they do not always realize that they do. Linux is used to browse the web, host web sites, write theses, send electronic mail and, as always with computers, to play games. Linux is emphatically not a toy; it is a fully developed and professionally written operating system used by enthusiasts all over the world.

Most people use Linux as a simple tool, often just installing one of the many good CD ROM-based distributions. A lot of Linux users use it to write applications or to run applications written by others. Many Linux users read the HOWTO's avidly and feel both the thrill of success when some part of the system has been correctly configured and the frustration of failure when it has not. A minority are bold enough to write device drivers and offer kernel patches to Linus Torvalds, the creator and maintainer of the Linux kernel. Linus accepts additions and modifications to the kernel sources from anyone, anywhere. This might sound like a recipe for anarchy but Linus exercises strict quality control and merges all new code into the kernel himself. At any one time though, there are only a handful of people contributing sources to the Linux kernel.

Intoduction

Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The kernel, at the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the GNU General Public License and its source code is freely available to everyone. It is this kernel that forms the base around which a Linux operating system is developed. There are now literally hundreds of companies and organizations and an equal number of individuals that have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel. More information on the kernel can be found at our sister site, LinuxHQ and at the official Linux Kernel Archives. The current full-featured version is 2.6 (released December 2003) and development continues.

Apart from the fact that it’s freely distributed, Linux’s functionality, adaptability and robustness, has made it the main alternative for proprietary Unix and Microsoft operating systems. IBM, Hewlett-Packard and other giants of the computing world have embraced Linux and support its ongoing development. Well into its second decade of existence, Linux has been adopted worldwide primarily as a server platform. Its use as a home and office desktop operating system is also on the rise. The operating system can also be incorporated directly into microchips in a process called “embedding” and is increasingly being used this way in appliances and devices.

Throughout most of the 1990’s, tech pundits, largely unaware of Linux’s potential, dismissed it as a computer hobbyist project, unsuitable for the general public’s computing needs. Through the efforts of developers of desktop management systems such as KDE and GNOME, office suite project OpenOffice.org and the Mozilla web browser project, to name only a few, there are now a wide range of applications that run on Linux and it can be used by anyone regardless of his/her knowledge of computers. Those choosing to using Linux can find a variety of versions or “distributions” of Linux that are easy to install, configure and use. Information on these distributions is available in the last pages of this booklet.

A Small History

The GNU Project, with the goal of creating a UNIX-like operating system composed entirely of free software, had begun development in 1984, and a year later Richard Stallman had created the Free Software Foundation and wrote the first draft of the GNU General Public License (GPLv1). By the early 1990s, the project had produced or collected many necessary operating system components, including libraries, compilers, text editors, and a Unix shell, and the upper level could be supplied by the X Window System, but development of the lower level, which consisted of a kernel, device drivers and daemons had stalled and was incomplete.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds began to work on the Linux kernel while he was attending the University of Helsinki. Torvalds originally intended Linux to be a non-commercial replacement for Minix, an educational operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

Code licensed under the GNU GPL can be used in other projects, so long as they too are released under the GPL. In order to make the Linux kernel compatible with the components from the GNU project, Torvalds changed his original license to the GPLv2. Linux and GNU developers worked to integrate GNU components with Linux. Thus Linux became a complete, fully functional free operating system.